News

Pam Bondi Fired as Attorney General

Attorney General Pam Bondi has been fired by President Donald Trump, a jarring reminder that in the modern presidency, the Justice Department can become both a legal institution and a political mirror. The White House has confirmed that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will step in as acting...

Judge Blocks Trump Order Targeting NPR and PBS Funding

For years, Americans have argued about whether public broadcasting deserves taxpayer support. That is a policy fight. On March 31, a federal court said the Trump White House tried to turn it into something else entirely: a constitutional violation. In a ruling that goes straight to the First...

Judge Halts White House Ballroom Until Congress Authorizes Funding

A federal judge has ordered construction on the proposed White House ballroom to pause unless and until Congress authorizes the project, turning a high-profile renovation fight into a civics lesson about who controls federal building decisions and, more importantly, federal dollars. The order...

Hegseth Lifts Suspension of Army Pilots After Kid Rock Flyover

A brief military spectacle outside a celebrity’s home turned into a small but revealing lesson in how the armed forces balance discipline, judgment, and public perception. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Army pilots who carried out a helicopter fly-by near musician Kid Rock’s...

The Noem Story and the Constitution’s Blackmail Problem

There are two separate stories wrapped inside the recent revelations about Bryon Noem, the husband of former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. The first is tabloid fodder: private photos, explicit messages, and a months-long online fetish exchange that reportedly involved cross-dressing...

When Schools Keep Parents in the Dark

A public school is not a family. It is not a church. It is not a private club with its own secret rules. It is an arm of the state, funded by taxpayers, entrusted with children, and bound by law. Which raises a question that sounds almost impolite in 2026 but should be routine in a constitutional...

The Pledge and the Price of Dissent

Every school has its rituals. The morning announcements. The bell schedule. The routines that promise order in a building full of young, unpredictable human beings. And then there is the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily ceremony that sits at a uniquely American tension point: part civic tradition,...

Chicago Mayor’s Armed Detail and Two Sets of Rules

There is a particular kind of argument that never happens in a courtroom and yet shapes constitutional culture anyway: the argument about who gets to live under the “real” rules. That is why a reported price tag attached to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s personal security has landed with...

When ‘Welfare Checks’ Skip Due Process

A federal jury in Texas has approved damages for a family who says two school district police officers took their 14-year-old daughter from her home after deciding, wrongly, that she had been “abandoned.” The case is not just about a bad call in a tense moment. Jurors concluded the officers...

The Supreme Court Just Rewrote the Rules for Therapy Bans

Colorado tried to do what many states have done over the last decade: use professional licensing law to block licensed counselors from performing so-called “conversion therapy” on minors. On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court said Colorado went too far, at least under the legal test the...

A Supreme Court Test for Gun-Industry Immunity

Congress does not pass many laws that announce their purpose as plainly as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005. Supporters of the law have long described the idea in straightforward terms: if a firearm is made and sold legally, and then later misused by a criminal, the...

Arrested by an Algorithm

A warrant is supposed to be the Constitution’s way of forcing the government to slow down, look closely, and justify itself. It is the point where suspicion has to harden into something more than a hunch. So what happens when a warrant is influenced by a machine’s “maybe,” and that maybe...

ICE at the Airport: Emergency Patch or New Normal?

Airports are one of the few public spaces where Americans already accept a heavy federal footprint as the price of safety. Metal detectors, ID checks, pat downs, no liquids, no jokes about bombs. We have lived inside that bargain for a generation. Now comes a new question, sharpened by a government...

Election Law Fights Headed to Court in 2026

Every midterm election is a civic stress test. In 2026, some of the most consequential arguments may unfold away from rallies and debates, in courtrooms, where voting rules are often contested. Because the details differ by state and by lawsuit, what follows is not a recap of any single docket. It...

ICE at the Airports Is a Dry Run for the Midterms

When federal immigration agents start showing up where ordinary civic life happens, the question is rarely just why they are there. The question is what we are being trained to accept. Democracy lawyer Ian Bassin, a co-founder of Protect Democracy, has been blunt about what he thinks is happening:...

ICE at Airports After TSA Pay Returns: A Civil Liberties Question

Airport security lines have been the most visible sign of the ongoing Department of Homeland Security funding breakdown. But a quieter change may outlast the paycheck crisis: federal immigration agents were brought into airports to help cover staffing gaps, and the administration is now signaling...

Elk v. Wilkins and the New Birthright Citizenship Fight

The Fourteenth Amendment sounds simple until you reach the phrase that does all the work. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” For more than a century, Americans have mostly treated that sentence as a...

Washington, D.C. is not just the seat of the federal government. It is where federal power gets questioned in public, under oath, and on a timetable that can move far slower than politics. Right now, that timetable is colliding with major parts of President Trump’s second-term agenda. In case...

Every generation gets its own version of the same civic argument: Where does a constitutional right end, and where does the government’s power to manage public spaces begin? This month, that argument moved into a particularly ordinary place with an unusually sharp legal edge, the neighborhood...

The Supreme Court is about to do something it has largely avoided for generations: squarely decide what the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause requires in the modern immigration era. On Wednesday, the justices will hear arguments over President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at narrowing...